What are The Best Ways to Master Theming in Drupal 8?

The time is finally here: it’s now the perfect time to upgrade your Drupal 7 and move on to Drupal 8. Drupal is a robust content management system that can provide unmatched customizability, great performance data analytics, and even has some of the best reliability of the major content management systems.

Despite all this, Drupal 8 has been long in the making. As an open source project, it still is fairly slow to be implemented on most sites, but there are a lot of great reasons to upgrade. While many site owners simply grab a theme from www.Drupal.org or from www.Drupalmodules.com, these pre-packaged themes don’t always quite do the job for every site, which is why designing your own custom made theme has a lot of advantages. In this guide, we’re going to answer the question, “What are the best ways to master theming in Drupal 8?”

1. Before Your Get Started Theming

Remember, a good Drupal development company can develop unique themes for your site fairly easily, so if you don’t have time to customize the custom style sheets (CSS) yourself, consider getting professional developers to do it. A good theme will show off what’s important about your site, it’ll relax your visitors, and it’ll help you convert, so it’s always going to worth the investment.

2. You’ll Need a Good Text Editor

You’ll need to browse directory structures and edit your themes CSS from time to time in order to get the maximum level of performance. As a result, doing your editing work in notepad simply won’t cut it. Fortunately, there are several amazing text editors out there that can get the job done like the hackable text editor Atom. The fact that Atom can actually help you navigate your directories really makes it a one-stop-shop for Drupal 8 themes.

3. Learn the Theme File and How to Use Them

There are a few key files and keys that you should really learn if you’re planning on working with Drupal 8 themes. Each has it’s own influence on your potential site’s look and feel, so here are a few to look out for:

Images

For every Drupal theme, you’ll need to have images so that the theme can have texture and color. This directory in your Drupal 8 is where the key images are housed that are responsible for your sites look and feel.

Breakpoints.yml

One thing is for sure: computing comes in a lot of different shapes and sizes these days. This is because your visitors are going to be viewing your site on their desktops, their laptops, their smartphones, and their tablets. This means that your site needs to be fluid and responsive so that it can appear attractive on all of these different screens; breakpoints.yml is how you can define the points so that the site fits all screen types.

These breakpoints are arranged through their weight value, so it’s really important to configure this part of your site correctly. The primary Drupal website has a great guide on how to work with these.

Info.yml

This is a mandatory file that you’ll have to establish for your theme. This file holds all of the information for your theme needed for it to run on Drupal 8. When you’re ready, create an info.yml file with the name of your theme at the front. It should appear like Yourthemename.info.yml – then, the internal information has to be setup so that Drupal knows exactly what to do in order to run your theme.

Logo.png

Your page has to have a logo on its theme, right? This file simply manages that, but it’s important nonetheless.

We hope you enjoyed our write up about the best ways to master theming in Drupal 8. It has been out for a few years now, but it’s still a bit complex and new to many people. Theming will take some time to master, but once you’ve mastered the files and keys that we mentioned, you’ll be well on your way.